We promoted our best people into management and now they cannot hold a room. What helps?
Presence is a craft with a technique, and the technique can be taught. Somebody promoted for being good at the work has never been asked to hold attention, tell a story people can use, or make a room in which people speak up. That is a performer's work, and it is practised in the body and the voice before it is practised in a script. A three day residential does exactly that, and its result is read by the manager's own team a month later.
The short answer. Presence is a craft with a technique, and the technique can be taught. Somebody promoted for being good at the work has never been asked to hold attention, tell a story people can use, or make a room in which people speak up. That is a performer's work, and it is practised in the body and the voice before it is practised in a script. A three day residential does exactly that, and its result is read by the manager's own team a month later.
- Its name in a budget line
- Leader and manager development. Leadership presence. Executive communication.
- The programme
- Leader as a performer. Three days, residential, for senior management. Ask about a shorter format for a cohort of newly promoted managers.
- Where
- On your own site, in Kochi and across Kerala, and elsewhere in India for a full day or more. Eight people or more. No artistic background is assumed and nothing is graded.
What is actually going on.
The promotion rewarded craft, and craft is the one thing a manager no longer does all day. What the new role needs is a different instrument: the ability to walk into a room and be read as someone worth listening to, to tell an account of the facts that lands rather than slides off, and to leave people more willing to speak than they were before. Nobody trained that. Most leadership communication training does not train it either, because it works on the script and a leader with a good script and no presence is a person reading.
Authority is read from posture, breath and timing well before anyone parses a sentence, and leaders lose rooms in two places, walking in unprepared and leaving without landing. A manager whose team will not speak has no information, and a manager with no information cannot manage. The presence problem and the psychological safety problem turn out to be the same problem seen from two chairs.
Leaders lose a room walking in and walking out, not in the middle.
What a session does about it.
The first day is the body: awareness, weight, breath and movement drawn from Kalari, from Capoeira and from animal movement. Senior people are not usually asked to move, and the first hours are the most uncomfortable of the three days. They are also where the largest change happens.
The second day is voice and story, built from the participants' own working lives, so that what they rehearse is the thing they will actually have to say in three weeks. The third day is an intensive theatre process ending in a performed piece in front of a real audience, in which every participant runs an actor's full cycle: entry, recital, exit.
Underneath the three days is a claim about the craft. Holding a room, reading its mood and moving it through an arc is the performer's work, and it is also, exactly, what management has always needed. One craft, exercised in different rooms under different names.
How you would know it worked.
Named behaviours rated by the manager's own team and peers, thirty to sixty days later. Does this person now open a meeting and land it. Does their team now raise a concern to them. The people best placed to say are the ones in the room with them every day, so they do the rating rather than us.
Psychological safety in the manager's own team, on the seven item scale, before the programme and at thirty days. A manager's presence is only worth anything if the room it produces is one people speak in, so that is the instrument we read.
What we do not claim.
We do not claim that three days make a leader, or that presence substitutes for judgement. Arts based leadership development has a body of evidence behind it and its own honest conclusion is that the field needs longitudinal work, and we say so.
We do not claim to fix a promotion decision that was wrong, and this is not executive coaching. It is a rehearsal room for an instrument nobody trained.
The full list is on one page, alongside the evidence and the claims we have retired.
In Kochi and Kerala.
In Kerala this question arrives most often from IT services firms and from hospitals, where the best engineer or the best clinician is promoted and then left to find the room on their own. The residential runs at a venue with a hall, and we help you find one if you do not have one.
We work from Kochi and run sessions on the client's own site anywhere in Kerala. Elsewhere in India we travel for a full day or more. If you would rather meet before you book, here is how.
Related questions.
We promoted our best people into management and now they cannot hold a room. What helps?
Presence is a craft with a technique, and the technique can be taught. Somebody promoted for being good at the work has never been asked to hold attention, tell a story people can use, or make a room in which people speak up. That is a performer's work, and it is practised in the body and the voice before it is practised in a script. A three day residential does exactly that, and its result is read by the manager's own team a month later.
Is this public speaking training?
No. Public speaking training works on the script. This works on the instrument, which is the body, the breath and the voice, and on the older question of what a story is for. Participants perform at the end, but the point is what they can do in a Tuesday meeting, not on a stage.
Do senior people really have to move?
Yes, and it is the part they thank us for afterwards. Posture and breath are where authority is read from, long before a sentence is parsed. Nothing is graded and nobody performs alone until the third day, by which time the room has done far stranger things together.
Can it be shorter than three days?
The full programme is three days and residential because presence is built in the body and the body needs time. A shorter format exists for college students and can be adapted for a cohort of newly promoted managers. Tell us who is in the room and we will say honestly whether a shorter version will do what you need.
Presence is a craft with a technique, and technique can be taught.
Eight people, one room, no preparation.